Review of Transcending Proof by Don McIntosh

Don McIntosh, Transcending proof: In Defense of Christian Theism, Houston Texas, Christian Acre Publishing, 2016.


Don McIntosh is a member of the Christian Cadre one of the foremost apologetics groups on the net. He's also published the Transcending Proof blog. He's written a fine book, Transcending Proof[1] that serves as a good introduction to the major issues of apologetics today. The book also contains some of Don's answers to more advanced issues that apologists of all levels will find interesting and useful.

McIntosh begins with the problem of evil. He argues that the reality of evil is a bigger problem for metaphysical naturalism than it is for Christian belief. [2] He deals with Godel's completeness theorem.[3] He summarize arguments by Swinburne,[4] The issues made this connection are similar to the argument I made about accepting a partially proven hypothesis, We can 't expect human observations to be compete thus we can;t expect a theory to appear complete outside it's own language game,

Playing off Bertrand Russell McIntosh argues "why I am not a Metaphysical naturalist and why I am a Christian." That is a prelude to his god arguments, McIntosh stabs at the validation of naturalistic claims,but goes beyond that to attack the coherence of it's world view.[5] I think I would be remiss if I did not point out that he argues that evolution is not proven, He's skeptical about it being a fact, He talks like the votes are not all in and if evolution has been declared a fact it's just something that happened yesterday. But really it's just propaganda by the drop of evolution rowdies. Evolution has considered a scientific fact by science since the nineteenth century,

But Don is not so naive., What appears to be first sight a typical creationist rant about the insufficiency of the evidence is in actuality a cleaver attack upon the hypocrisy of atheists claiming empirical empirical grounds while being willing to rule in evolution desire not having empirical grounds. He's not attacking evolution as true per se, He's attacking the rejection of God on grounds that the road to belief is not paved with empirical data, while accepting evolution as a substantiate when it has similar empirical limitations,[6] I thought at first I was going to have to pan that part of the book, seeing as how i see creationism as regressive.. But I appreciate the cleverness of the approach,

He deals with several other issues that I want go into, I have to talk about the swipe he takes at the boy wonder Richard Carrier. Carrier has claimed that God's nonexistence is provable. Don talks about this fallacious aspect of Carrier's ideology, I'm not going to give away the arguments. Transcending Proof is well worth reading and even the old campaigner can find many interesting arguments I recommend the very highly. Don has a Masters of Divinity degree. He is not a professional scholar and the book is published by the Cadre not by an academic publisher,It is still a fine book and is of interest to anyone doing apologetic,




Sources

[1] Don McIntosh, Transcending proof: In Defense of Christian Theism, Houston Texas, Christian Acre Publishing, 2016.
[2] Ibid., 14
[3] 22
[4] 23
[5] 29
[6] 39